Shifting to paperless contract lifecycle management to help schools navigate COVID-19

[Editor’s note: This content was written to highlight a particular event or moment in time. Although that moment has passed, we’re republishing it here so you can see what our thinking and experience was like at the time.]

Paperless contract lifecycle management (CLM) suddenly became more important during the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic, when schools had to go fully virtual to teach their students.

In 2020, organizations everywhere scrambled to adapt to changing conditions. The effect was especially pronounced for school systems, which needed to manage the transition to remote learning while ensuring educators and students were equipped with the tools and technology to make education at home effective. As a result, there was rapid growth in demand for professional services among educational organizations.

At the outset of the pandemic, Microsoft committed to supporting educators with training and resources to empower the transition to virtual and hybrid learning. Microsoft’s Global Training Partner (GTP) program was a cornerstone of that effort. The program represents a way for school systems around the world to find certified training partners who can support them with Microsoft tools and technology.

Microsoft’s GTP program was already active and robust, but it needed to scale alongside the rapidly expanding, pandemic-driven training needs of school systems worldwide. To accomplish that, the team needed to streamline the partner onboarding process—fast.

Previously, the process relied on paper forms like non-disclosure agreements, terms and conditions documents, and rules for collaboration—paperless CLM wasn’t something most schools were thinking about. Those hand-filled forms primarily relied on distribution by outside vendors, then headed through Microsoft Corporate, External, and Legal Affairs (CELA). The process wasn’t optimal from an efficiency standpoint, and it also exposed documentation efforts to error and duplicated work.

The Modern Workplace education team started looking for an automated, paperless CLM solution.

[Find out how Microsoft is powering digital transformation with Modern Data Foundations. Learn about designing a modern data catalog to enable business insights at Microsoft. Explore how Microsoft’s modern data governance strategy is accelerating digital transformation.]

Building a paperless CLM solution

Early in their discovery process, members of Microsoft’s Modern Workplace education team and owner of the GTP program approached CELA to see if they had a process in place for streamlining partner onboarding documentation. As it happened, CELA had already been working with Microsoft Digital Employee Experience engineers on a system to facilitate paperless CLM.

The intention was to build a headless system so that teams like GTP could come and integrate with us via APIs. Other teams would then snap into our existing engine to create their own separate processes.

—Chau Nguyen, program manager, Microsoft CELA

Over the course of seven months in 2019, Microsoft’s internal engineering team had been developing a solution leveraging icertis CLM capabilities, a leader in the CLM space.

“We worked with business partners in CELA to see what the needs were, then wove in the functionality of the Icertis CLM,” says Bidyadhar Patra, a Microsoft Digital Employee Experience engineering manager partnered with CELA. “We asked what other capabilities were necessary, worked through brainstorming and analysis, then worked on design.”

Patra’s team used tools across the Microsoft Azure technology stack to create a modern, API-based CLM solution with template automation, obligation management, and workflow management capabilities. “The intention was to build a headless system so that teams like GTP could come and integrate with us via APIs,” says Chau Nguyen, program manager on the CELA team. “Other teams would then snap into our existing engine to create their own separate processes.”

Legal is a complex domain. To understand the nuances of legal terms and build a user experience that’s helpful for efficiency and compliance, it’s critical to work closely with all of our internal business partners.

—Bidyadhar Patra, engineering manager, Microsoft Digital

The solution represented an integrated tool for managing the entire contract lifecycle, from creation through signing and output. It also included an API layer to make the system serviceable across different teams within Microsoft. The tool became known internally as Intelligent Contracting as a Service (ICaaS).

Due to the complexities of compliance and contract law, as well as the unique needs of the education space, close collaboration between Microsoft Digital Employee Experience engineers and CELA’s legal professionals was essential throughout the process.

Nguyen and Patra pose for individual photos that have been combined into a collage. — Chau Nguyen (left) and Bidyadhar Patra are part of the team that transformed how Microsoft helps schools navigate COVID-19 and shift to paperless contract lifecycle management. (Photos by Chau Nguyen and Bidyadhar Patra)

“Legal is a complex domain,” Patra says. “To understand the nuances of legal terms and build a user experience that’s helpful for efficiency and compliance, it’s critical to work closely with all of our internal business partners.”

CELA implemented ICaaS in September or 2019, just in time to support the GTP program’s pandemic-driven need for rapid scaling and onboarding. With the CLM foundation in place, the Modern Workplace education team worked alongside CELA and Microsoft Digital Employee Experience to create a system that would largely automate partner onboarding, from application to document production, distribution, and retrieval.

The GTP onboarding process is a mostly automated workflow supported by the ICaaS CLM system that requires human interaction only at essential junctures:

Potential GTP candidates apply for the program through an external portal, where an algorithm trims unqualified applicants.
Eligible candidates enter a customer relationship management (CRM) system for approval and governance.
The system initiates document creation integrated with Adobe E-Sign for paperless onboarding and passes it to the candidate.
The tool pushes signed documents through workflows specific to legal and managing teams.
Once onboarding is complete, the system uploads the partner to the public-facing GTP catalog.
A Microsoft Power Apps integration automatically ingests them into an exclusive GTP channel on Microsoft Teams for communication and management.
The training partner’s identity enters a custom Microsoft Power BI dashboard for tracking and monitoring.

The system removes all human intervention except where necessary, freeing team members to spend their time and energy resolving issues or developing strategic projects. This allowed it to become less about tool management and more about program management.

The outcomes of automation

This solution has enormously impacted Microsoft’s ability to provide the professional support necessary for educators to reach students during remote and hybrid learning.

“Because we were able to do all of the back-end cleanup and automation with CRM, we’re now driving greater partner discoverability,” says one of the members of the Modern Workplace education team. “It makes it very easy for the customers to discover who their training partners are, the training topics they need, and just get connected. So we’re able to drive leads and connect customers to partners in a more refined way.”

The system is helping scale the GTP program more quickly and effectively than ever before. From a potential training partner’s application to inception into the program, the time has decreased from three months to just one week. As a result, there are now more than 500 training partners in the GTP catalog.

On average, one partner has contact with around 1,000 educators per year. With those numbers, it’s not surprising that Microsoft Teams, the primary platform for virtual and hybrid learning, has reached 100 million monthly active users in education. The Modern Workplace education team attributes much of that success to the training partners onboarded through the streamlined intake system.

The Modern Workplace education team’s work has even forged a path for other businesses within Microsoft to develop their own automated contract management solutions in conjunction with CELA. There are currently 13 individual teams tapping into the ICaaS CLM engine.

In the education space, the collaboration between Microsoft Digital Employee Experience, CELA, and the GTP program is empowering the technology and training educators need to serve students in any circumstance—whether that’s a typical school day or a global disruption.

Explore existing solutions before creating your own tool from scratch.
Collaboration and joint planning are essential for avoiding rework.
Educate stakeholders about what you’re trying to achieve.
Stay focused on what drives the best value for customers and partners.
Tool suites tend to work together well. If you can keep your solution within one toolset, the results will be more manageable.